Preschoolers and Art

Teaching Preschoolers How to Draw:

Putting the Monart Art School Techniques Through the Paces :

 

Diagram 1: “Lion” Felt-tipped marker drawing with tempera and glitter painting. Artist aged 5.

Mona Brookes developed a system of drawing techniques based under a notation system of marks, which she determined were the basic elements of design: dots, circles, straight lines, curved lines, angles—visual components into which any object one might wish to draw could be reduced. This, as opposed to the Classical European system, based upon geometric forms like circles, squares, the Golden Triangle, the Fibionacci spiral, etc., and rules of perspective, which Brookes claimed were imprecise, or, perhaps, overly abstracted so that children cannot readily see them in objects, or too complicated and confusing. She claimed her system was more logical, obvious and simple, easier for children to understand and apply. I decided to try it out.

Preschoolers and Art

Using Freestyle Painting Methods to Introduce Toddlers and Preschoolers to Art

Second in a Series on Teaching Art to Toddlers and Preschoolers

 

“Rainbow with Stars”. A wet-on-wet tempera and watercolour painting with white gouache spatters by a 4-year-old

 

 

Initial attempts to learn any skill are gestural and inchoate, but small children gradually acquire self-control and hone their perceptions so that the process of making art eases up. Any number of physiological, emotional and intellectual barriers can impede their learning process, but bear with it even while that process is messy and chaotic and the results are ugly, for they move through these limitations in their own time. Some notable milestones are described in Teaching Art to Preschoolers: Understanding the Different Stages, and it’s possible to refer to them when considering whether it’s time to refine the child’s motor control, expand their visual perception, and increase their vocabulary of notation. Although it’s a temptation to step in when we notice they are experiencing problems, sometimes it’s more important to let young children freely play. Children learn a great deal while they seem to be fiddling around, achieving nothing. If play-time is always interrupted by an authority, the child feels oppressed and the activity is no longer fun. They stop engaging in it freely and with joy. This article deals with the first stages of art creation and when to introduce new techniques and ideas.

Preschoolers and Art

Teaching Preschool Children to Draw and Paint:

Understanding the Different Stages

Diagram One: “Flower Garden”, a mapped copy of an original work by Nakamura Asumiko, drawn with felt-tipped markers and painted with tempera and watercolours by a 5-year-old.

Anyone who can see can learn how to draw and paint. Even preschoolers are capable of learning how to make relatively sophisticated representational work, a process which has amazing developmental correlations with other skills and attributes. This process takes time, knowledge, effort, demonstration, instruction, supervision, and patience. The learning curve is massive and doesn’t end until the artist puts down the brushes, pencils or other instruments forever. The process also goes through stages which eerily mimic epochs and periods within the very history of art itself.

Strange Chimaera: The Mannerist Gardens at Tivoli

Tivoli, 27th June, 2015: Villa D’Adriana, Villa D’Este and the Tivoli Gardens.

Tivoli Gardens at Villa D’Este in Rome, View of the Water Organ from the Fish Ponds.

Villa D’Este and the Tivoli Gardens — the Mannerist Palace and giardini delle meraviglie conceived and commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este in 1550  (so as not to be confused with the Tivoli Gardens Amusement Park in Copenhagen) — lies about 35 kilometres from Metropolitan Rome in the ancient Etruscan town of Tiberti, now Tivoli. Its many fountains, ponds and grottoes are fed from an underground cistern, supplied by the Aniene River (formally Teverone), which had been diverted about a kilometer from its original flow as a Renaissance era flood control program, and by the Rivellese Spring, site of Albunea, the Tiburtine Sibyl who predicted Augustus Caesar’s deification.

The Aura of Art in its Original Setting

Rome, 26th June, 2015: Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica

Papal Altar, Baldachin and Altar of the Chair of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome

It felt like a sprint to the finish. A half-hour before opening, our tour guide met us below the entrance to the Vatican Museums, and whisked us through the doors. Antiquities, statues, frescoes, paintings, furnishings, candelabra, curiosities and maps swept past as our guide skimmed over the names of dead popes, cardinals and European (but mainly Italian) aristocrats, and rattled off a running list of materials which sounded like jewels in a genie’s cabinet: marble from Aquitaine, jasper from Sicily, alabaster from Syria, acacia wood, oak, gilt bronze. Occasionally, she dropped an interesting oddment of information, like a pearl into the surf—Ignazio Danti’s Panoramic Map of Venice, which shows that the city hasn’t changed all that much in 430 years, or an embellishment of gold ripped from the heart of Montezuma’s palace.

Symbolism and the Appropriation of Myths

Rome, 25th June, 2015: Villa Borghese, Galleria and Gardens

On the Pincian hill overlooking the Fields of Mars in Rome abide two spectacular and very famous Renaissance pleasure palaces: Villa Medici, owned by the French Academy in Rome, which operates studios and sponsors a program for young visiting artists and scholars (any artist under 40 may consider applying for this); and Villa Borghese Pinciana.

Villa Borghese Pinciana

This comprises the original palace complex constructed by Flaminio Ponzio in 1613 to fulfill the commission from Cardinal Scipione Borghese, (1 September 1577 – 2 October 1633) maternal nephew of Pope Paul V, which now houses the Galleria Borghese, with one of the most influential public art collections in the world—including sculptures by Bernini and Canova, paintings by Caravaggio, Titian, Artemisia Gentilleschi and Rubens (amongst many others), Greco-Roman and Egyptian antiquities, and superb frescoes, mouldings, floors and furniture—as well as the massive Casina Villa Borghese, an 80-hectare Mannerist Park, stuffed to the canopy with follies, reconstructions and monuments.

Detail from Scenes from La Storie di Marco Furio Camillo, fresco ceiling in the Grand Salon at Villa Borghese painted by Mariano Rossi,1775 – 1779.

On 25th June, 2015, I toured Villa Borghese and the surrounding park and gardens with Gianluca Fabris of City Wonders. Entrance to the Gallery is regulated by limits placed on, both, the duration of time allowed to view the collections, and numbers of people admitted during its hours of operation. Without these limitations, the gallery would be moiled in continuous traffic jams similar to the Botticelli gallery at the Uffizi, or in front of Michelangelo’s Pièta at St. Peter’s Basillica. Openings to tour the gallery often sell out weeks in advance, especially during the height of the tourist season, and like most public sites in Italy, it is closed throughout the entire month of August (August is not the kindest month for art-lovers in Italy.) Once ticket-holders have checked their bags, they have exactly an hour and spare change to race through some of the most dazzling works of art ever created. This is why skip-the-line tours were invented, and why a tour guide is almost essential.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo é Dafne (1622 – 1625)

(That’s my tour guide discussing something with a client behind some marble foliage.)

By all means, once a person has already scoped out where the Apollo é Dafne stands, book that return trip and spend another pitifully short hour gazing at Bernini’s amazing way with toes being turned into roots—as I may do one day if I ever get back there:

Detail of Daphne’s toes from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo é Dafne (1622 – 1625)

(And those were carved completely with chisels and hand-bores—as every art professor who taught me has pointed out—no electric drills or sanders for Bernini!)

Even within that short time span, a relatively comprehensive overview of the gallery was imparted before the final precious seconds ticked away, and “Luca” certainly knew his art history. He relayed about a month’s worth of Introduction to Western Art 101 – 103 lessons clearly, concisely and in a very entertaining fashion, along with witty observations about Pope’s ‘nipotes’, Roman fashion and décor during the Napoleanic era, 18th-Century café culture and the language of symbols.

Anyway, I don’t intend to critique tour companies and how they go about amusing and educating their clients, no matter how much I enjoyed and appreciated them. Nor do I intend to go on about the wonders of Villa Borghese, even if the gallery is one of the loveliest jewel boxes of Western art treasures anywhere.

Greco-Roman statue in the loggia at Villa Borghese, along with a display of items used by the guards.

What I would like to address is the interpretation of myths, which came up several times during my tour of the Borghese gallery, where the story of Apollo and the nymph, Daphne, for example, was interpreted as being about platonic love. When the Sun-God pursues her, Daphne calls out in terror to her father, the river god, Peneus, and is transformed into a laurel tree the moment her toes touch the water at the banks of his river, thus placing her forever beyond Apollo’s rampaging and egocentric libido.

Clear and Open Skies? Teaching Art to Children

The Surprising Artistic Capabilities of Children
(when they have your full attention)

Because of my upcoming tour of Europe and workshop, I’ve been prompted to write about my experiences teaching art to children in the hopes of inspiring others to kit up the kids with smocks, paint and brushes and let them go at it.

I’ve worked with some amazingly talented youngsters. The following image, for example, is a mural that was designed and painted in the mid-2000s by K. Smith, a (then) seven-year-old girl:

 

Her sister, L. Smith, was only nine or ten when she painted this one:

Oh Canada! Contemporary Art Exhibition

How ironic that Oh, Canada, an exhaustive survey and exhibition of select Contemporary Canadian Art, was originally compiled for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in Boston, back in 2012. As the New York Times Review mentioned, Canada is ” a country that has nurtured numerous international art stars and has plenty of government support for the arts but has not had a coast-to-coast biennial since 1989.”[1]

Three years later, it opened in Calgary with typical Canadian pomp, yesterday (Saturday, 31st January, 2015), just as the city returned to post-Chinook snow and bluster, with line-ups to catch the wood-paneled Bass Bus, where passengers between venues were soothed and lulled with live performances of Canadian folksongs.

The one-hundred selected art works representing 62 artists and collectives from across Canada were too massive in scope, scale and quantity for a single exhibition venue in Calgary; so four major public gallery and museum spaces have collaborated to mount this show: the Nickle Arts Gallery at the University of Calgary, The Illingworth-Kerr Gallery at Alberta College of Art and Design, the second floor art space at the Glenbow Museum and the Esker Foundation.

Yesterday’s openings provided a general overview of the exhibition, but it is too diverse to cover in a single entry, especially since the Illingworth Kerr gallery closed within minutes of my arrival from the Nickle, and the line-ups to view the show at the Esker wound all the way from the building’s fourth storey to the second floor. Ergo, I will return over the next few weeks to spend some time at each venue in detail.

[1] Rosenburg, Karen “Border Crossing Identity Crisis“, New York Times Arts and Culture section, 1st paragraph, August 30, 2012.

Beneath Springhill: The Maurice Ruddick Story

Beau Dixon performs as Canadian hero, Maurice Ruddick, whose bright spirits helped to keep 5 fellow miners alive for 10 days after one of the worst mining disasters in Canadian history, at Lunchbox Theatre.

On the 23 October of 1958, a large bump — a geological tremor which resembles an earthquake — at the one of the deepest mines in the world, the No. 2 colliery, 2 miles under the town of Springhill, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, caused major sections of the shaft to collapse. 174 Miners were underground when this happened, only 99 of whom were eventually rescued. Maurice Ruddick — a black man with twelve children and a talent for singing the blues — was one of the last miners to be rescued, a group of six men who were hauled out on November 1, 8 days after the disaster struck. Ruddick’s musical talents, good spirits and sense of camaraderie were cited as some of the main reasons his team survived. For this, he was awarded “Citizen of the Year”, becoming the first ever African-Canadian to receive it.

Christmas Truce story was more than a legend.

The Christmas Truce of 100 years ago really happened, but the story is wrapped up in legend and wishful thinking:

Truce in the trenches was real, but football tales are a shot in the dark
British and German soldiers did briefly stop killing, but there is little evidence to support story of a kickabout in no-man’s land.

by Stephen Moss,
published The Guardian, Tuesday, 16 December, 2014; 18.48 GMT